“I am Who I am”

When faced with difficult & complicated circumstances, I must admit that sometimes I do have my doubts if God will help me in these times of need, just as He has helped me before.

That’s how, being the fallible humans that we are, we end up focusing on the problem(s) & forget about God in the process… the God overlooking everything that goes on in this Earth. And by holding on to these doubts, we have seemingly fallen into the very common trap of questioning the very nature & character of God.

Perhaps, it may be because it is just too common for humans like us to be sometimes worried over our lives’ inconsistencies & uncertainties about a great many things… resulting in us to also beginning to view God in this similar manner.

I thank God for clarifying several issues in today’s bible study.

God Himself says He is unchanging

I discovered that when Abraham asked God how He wishes to be addressed to the Israelites, God specifically replied & referred to Himself as “I am Who I am” (Exodus 3:14). Wow… what a bold statement!

I pondered about this phrase for a few seconds… before I realized that this is how God is like… & that’s Who He says He is (not ‘was’). He is… which means that He never changes even before this Earth came into existence. He is an unchanging God, even though we may sometimes think of Him as uncertain & confusing. I’m most guilty of that. And that, I believe is where our humanly problem lies – when we begin to think of God as we do ourselves.

As we seek to grow in our understanding & personal relationship with our Heavenly Father, it helps to keep in mind that we shouldn’t encase Him in whatever concept that our human minds can assume Him out to be. It is true that God made us in His likeness, but that doesn’t make us exactly the same as Him. He is God & we will never be able to fathom all His reasons, thoughts & plans.

How biblical names came about

While growing up in primary & secondary school, I remember that there were many people, including myself, who equate English names as Christian names. For example, a person who is called ‘Eugene’ may be identified as someone with a Christian name.

At that time, all I knew about Christian names were that there were from the Bible. Yet, there was a classmate named ‘Daniel’ who sat next to me in secondary 2, whom I assumed to be a Christian, but he wasn’t. It was then that the 14-year old me, realized that just because a person has a Christian name, it doesn’t mean that he or she is a Christian. Yet I was still confused… about how else to differentiate between a Christian name & an English name.

After so many years since then, I had long forgotten about this issue. But it is strangely astonishing that I have been reading the Bible for so many years, yet only actually & finally recognized the distinct difference in today’s bible study!

Once again, a classic example of God’s timing of when He decides to open our eyes to discover things… =)

In today’s bible study, I discovered that biblical names are not simply whatever names that are found in the books of the Holy Bible… but these names are founded based on how the biblical characters personally came to know & experience God!

Throughout the Bible, we frequently see new names, titles or descriptions of God, following an event where a biblical character experienced God. And scripture is a record of God’s revelation of Himself to Man… & each name for God forms a part of that revelation of the person Whom He claims Himself to be …

For example, when Joshua & the Israelites were fighting the Amalekites, Moses had to maintain uplifted hands to indicate that the battle was the Lord’s… before the Israelites won. It was then that Moses built an altar to the Lord & called it “The Lord is my Banner”… for a banner goes out in front of an army to indicate who it represents.

God intended us to experience crises of belief

God intentionally put Abraham through a crisis of belief to develop his character to be the father of a nation. Thus, Abraham’s faith & obedience was tested when God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his only son on the altar.

This was how Abraham began to know God to be His provider, despite this scary situation & through this experience learnt to act on his belief in Him.

In short, God allows difficult circumstances into our lives, so that through these encounters, we will learn to know Him more & experience His work in our lives.